Please relax. I don’t claim to have special moral purity or whatever. Opposing genocide just seems like an obvious baseline. Besides, from the perspective of the individual voter (or eligible non-voter) there were no options of statistical possibility. The election was going to go the way it did regardless of what you or I decided to do with our single ballots. The voters who compromised on genocide got nothing except self-imposed damage to their minds and souls. The only way it would have gone differently is if the Democrats ran a better campaign with a different platform and probably with a different candidate.

Bake some cookies. Apart from that, maybe find some colorful wall art and rugs. How about painting the wall behind the sink a fun, warm color to break up all the white?

I like your kitchen very much, btw.

I’m not saying that in the US system, at the presidential level, the loss of one of the two main parties doesn’t ensure the victory of the other. I’m saying that that doesn’t matter to a regular individual who is eligible to vote. That person only gets one ballot and their choices are what is printed on the ballot as well as leaving some or all of it blank.

This one or the other correlative is actually the purview of the campaigns. They have the power to sway enough votes to matter by adjusting their messaging, strategy, and, for the incumbents, actual policy. Instead of looking at what they were up against and eschewing the status quo, the Democrats decided to make the following threat to voters: give us permission to keep exterminating Palestinians or the other guy might take away your various rights here at home. The continued massacre of Palestinians wasn’t their only demand, but I’m just trying to stay on-topic. It’s darkly humorous that the voters who made the choice to acquiesce to that threat ended up morally compromising on genocide for a candidate that apparently was going to lose anyway.

“I voted for the genocide lady in the hopes of rewarding her and her party with four more years in the White House and blocking anyone who hasn’t had a material role in the Palestinian genocide .” That’s what you sound like. You cannot morally justify voting for Harris unless you can justify her ongoing role in the genocide. No one else running for president came close to playing such a role and, of course, there’s nothing immoral about abstaining.

Anyway, I’m just answering the OP. One does not have to vote on the basis of morality. People make immoral decisions all the time. It’s just easily understandable why many people wouldn’t cross that line.

To an individual voter in a large electorate the idea that a Harris loss would ensure a Trump victory isn’t relevant except as an excuse to vote immorally for Harris, the genocide candidate. The only moral choices were to abstain or vote for an explicitly anti-genocide candidate.

The moral argument against voting for Harris doesn’t imply that one has to vote for Trump instead.

California is Kamala’s home state, so I guess it tracks.

The moral argument that one should not vote for someone who has been and continues to provide massive material support to a genocide is as clear as day.

Ah, well! Nevertheless,

I have to figure out the math on it, but I doubt that 2:1 is a good deal.

Follow-up edit:

• In New Jersey, as an example of a safe state for Harris, Fivethirtyeight has Harris winning in 993 out of 1000 simulated elections. Assuming the same turnout as 2020 of 4,549,457 votes, there’s a 0.500546 chance, on average, that a NJ voter will vote for Harris. I figured that out using the BINOM.DIST.RANGE function and the Goal Seek tool in Excel.
• In Michigan, with a turnout of 5,539,302 voters in 2020, Harris wins in only 605 out of 1000 simulations. Using the same tools above, if you randomly picked any Michigan voter, there’s a 0.500059 chance that he or she is voting for Harris.
• Using the BINOMDIST function with the assumed turnouts and the chances we determined that voters in each of the above states would go for Harris, there’s a 3.25986e-4 chance that Michigan is decided by a single vote. Likewise, there’s a 2.47681e-5 chance for the same in NJ. Based on the probability that it could shift electoral college votes, a Michigan ballot is distinctly more powerful than an NJ one.
• If you could could reliably convince one more person to vote like you in NJ, your chances of affecting the NJ outcome only increase to 2.48222e-5.
• For an NJ voter to match their chances of affecting the Michigan outcome, they would have to command about 1,925 votes besides their own. In other words, there’s an almost equal chance of a single vote Harris victory in MI as a 1,926 vote victory in NJ.
• Therefore, if a Michigan voter values their power, they should not trade their vote for anything less than 1,926 New Jersey votes. The rate should actually be greater to account for welching and Michigan having one more electoral vote than NJ.

It mostly makes sense. There are infamous examples of voting being de jure or de facto illegal for groups of people where their suffrage would likely cause significant change. Just look at the USA pre-Civil Rights Act, Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, and Israel. I’m sure there are others.

You assume that dolphins don’t already have democracy. If wild dogs have it figured out, then it’s certainly possible, even likely, that dolphins do too. Imagine what a pod of dolphins might vote to do with a land mammal that has the audacity to try and teach them democracy.

o7

Here’s a link to the paper referenced by the article. Not sure why it wasn’t included with the article. Anyway, this chart stood out to me:

Don’t believe or respect anyone who says the White House is working on a ceasefire deal. This administration has clearly been working on just the opposite.

I think I understand the spirit of your question, but the way you’ve worded it suggests that the law is immutable and/or that lawbreakers are necessarily evildoers. I interpret the question as “without incarceration, what do we do about those who do harm to others”. To that I would answer that we need institutions and programs that provide various types of care, support, and protection to people and that those who cause harm and do not provide restitution to their victims lose access to those institutions and programs. For example, if a child molester’s house burns down, the fire department would not be expected to try and save them. If it was arson then the arsonist might only get fined for creating an environmental hazard and putting adjacent buildings at risk. The lack of a carceral system would make funding available for the above programs and institutions.

If you would not have called Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa the good guys then you should not consider Israel to be the good guys either.

Oh, gross. I don’t support any of the amendments.

Maybe. I don’t like Elon or Trump, but I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for entering a raffle for some of Elon’s money.

Is there any downside to signing up for the sweepstakes besides having to sign a pledge?

Neither. There’s plenty of room and resources here on Earth. I think it’s fine to do space exploration and even have research bases on moons and other planets, but I just don’t see the imperative for colonization.